Globalization’s final frontier

SEGOU, Mali — Usually, nothing much changes in this dust-choked West African city.

Families live in mud-built huts along the Niger River, where fishermen in paddle-powered boats cast nets for catfish and carp. The weekly market announces itself by sending out a pungent stench, from pile after pile of cured fish. Most of the traffic amounts to donkeys pulling precarious cart loads of millet and sheep; Men use switches, prods, and clubs, to spur the beasts forward. Segou is Mali’s second-largest city, but life here is stuck, in many ways, in a pre-modern era.

That’s why people here were flummoxed when, three years ago, Libyan leader Moammer Gadafi built a sleek concrete mosque large enough to hold 10,000 people near the city center.

In a region known among adventure travelers for towering mud mosques built generations ago, Gadafi’s mosque is like a gaudy costume necklace set in an antique jewelry box. But many Malians are delighted.

“It’s so beautiful that when I go inside, I’m inspired to be a better Muslim,” says Baaba Traore, 67. In a city perpetually coated with dust and goat dung, the mosque, protected by tall walls, is a clean oasis. The imam is chauffeured in a luxury car – a rare reminder for Malians that there is a world of riches beyond their rural fields.

This sweltering, desperately poor country appears to be one of the world’s most forgotten places. It’s a landlocked African wild west hemmed in by Niger, Burkina Faso and Mauritania; a place so slow that a sandy lane passes as a national highway and the boys herding goats beside it wave ecstatically whenever a car passes. Many drivers — strung out from the long desert slog — prefer to push through the night rather than staying in the seedy roadside inns that serve up young prostitutes as cheaply as mugs of millet beer.

Even in Bamako, the capital city, Mali is thoroughly under-developed. Raw sewage courses through open ditches. It wasn’t until recently that the first ATM’s appeared, and even now they’re only connected to a network so small that it renders them useless to many foreigners. Herders, dressed in long robes with indigo turbans piled high atop their heads, move sheep and goats straight through the city’s heart.

But call it a sign of how small the world has become, or how pervasive globalization has spread, but here in the boondocks of backwaters, diverse interests from around the world have begun to seep in. Oil-craving world leaders are searching the Sahara for signs of oil riches deep in the earth. U.S. soldiers wander through Mali’s river port cities each evening after teaching Malian forces how to fight terrorists and rebels who threaten to take over the country’s lawless northern region. And Gadafi, fueled by his desire to become the godfather of the continent, is lavishing mosques, money and aid on the Malian government….

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